The most stunning revelation in a 370-page Justice US Department Inspector General's report released this week was that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had formally opened a "War Crimes" file, documenting torture they had witnessed at the GuantÃ¡namo Bay US prison camp, before being ordered by the administration to stop writing their reports.

President George W. Bush Thursday ordered White House lawyers to use claims of executive privilege to prevent senior White House aides from cooperating with the Justice Department's criminal investigation into destruction of videotapes that showed CIA interrogators torturing terrorism suspects.

The White House says President Bush will veto legislation on Saturday that would have barred the CIA from using waterboarding -- a technique that simulates drowning -- and other harsh interrogation methods on terror suspects.

"Hey, it was good enough for the Nazis and the Spanish Inquisition, so it's goldanged good enough for ME!" -- Official White Horse Souse

If this pro-torture stand was Dobson's alone, there would be little attention paid to it. But last month an ethics professor, Daniel R. Heimback, at Southeastern Baptist Seminary, favors torture much as Dobson does. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leaders also favor torture. A Baptist Press (BP) release reported that to oppose torture "threatens to undermine Christian moral witness in contemporary culture." They went on to say that situation ethics necessitates that sometimes torture is the right thing to do.

And of course the most horrific tortures in history (including waterboarding) were done by the Christian's (UN)Holy Inquisition!

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally authorized the use of brutal interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay despite warnings from the FBI that the methods amounted to inhumane treatment, was possibly illegal, and would not produce reliable intelligence, a Department of Justice inspector general testified Tuesday.

"The FBI believed that these techniques were not getting actionable information, that they were unsophisticated and unproductive," said Glenn Fine, the DOJ's inspector general, in testimony Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "They raised their concerns with the Department of Defense, but the Department of Defense, from what we were told, dismissed those concerns and that no changes were made in the Department of Defense's strategy."

One has to wonder if Rumsfeld and his associates in this and the former Bush administration were the kind of kids who pulled the wings off flies, just for fun.

And by the way, this testimony is one more example of members of this and Bush's former administration lying about what it was actually happening.

"There is a huge number of [secret prisoners] being held in Iraq, and one of the intriguing aspects of this that doesn't get much reporting is that the US is bringing people into Iraq from elsewhere to hold them there, simply because that keeps [the media and lawyers] away from the prisoners so they can't get any sort of legal rights," reports British attorney Clive Stafford Smith.

The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

In American custody, Al-Ghizzawi was only beaten with chains; bound to chairs in excruciating positions for endless hours; threatened with death and with rape; stripped and subjected to body-cavity searches by non-medical personnel while men -- and women -- laughed and took pictures.

Among many other brutalities and indignities, Al-Ghizzawi was also posed naked with other prisoners; terrorized with dogs; forced to kneel on stones in the searing heat; left to stand or crouch for extended periods; deprived of sleep; subjected to extreme cold without clothes or covering; denied medical attention; and kept in isolation for years.

While jailed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, a Red Cross official wrote a letter home for Kurnaz and it was the "dumb stuff" in the letter that infuriated the Americans, according to the cover story in the Spring issue of "Amnesty International" (AI)magazine. The guards' response illustrates the pains the Bush regime is taking to conceal from the world its horrific crimes against Muslim prisoners in dungeons around the world. There have been numerous other cases now where the Red Cross has not been informed of the existence of "ghost prisoners", such as in the CIA prison in Kabul, or even told of the existence of a prison itself. Not surprisingly, the Red Cross has found U.S. methods are, at the least, "tantamount to torture."

Remember, this is done in your name, with your tax dollars, and in the name of the United States of America.

Makes you feel proud, doesn't it?

And just a friendly bit of advice; if you're thinking of traveling overseas these days, make sure you've got something suggesting you're Canadian in your carry-on luggage, or perhaps sport a Canadian branded t-shirt. People around the world do not loathe us "because we are free", but because of what we have become, in terms of a general resigned acceptance that torture is normal, and this administration has the right to indulge in pre-emptive wars of aggresssion.

The Pentagon urged interrogators at GuantanamoBay to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify about potentially harsh treatment of detainees, a military defense lawyer said Sunday.

The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged having 7,000 pages of documents pertaining to President George W. Bush's secret rendition and detention programs, according to three international human rights groups.

Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law made the claim following a summary judgment motion by the agency this week to avoid a lawsuit that seeks to force the nation's top spy outfit to make the documents public under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The CIA also acknowledged in their filings that the program "will continue." Terror suspects detained or "renditioned" by the United States are transferred to third party countries that allow torture which gives the US a legal loophole to allow harsh interrogation without being legally liable. Such suspects, who effectively disappear, are held without access to courts.

Recent letters from the U.S. Justice Department to Congress state that intelligence agents working on counterterrorism can legally use interrogation techniques that might otherwise be banned by international law, The New York Times reported in its Sunday editions.

The US Government cannot declare something to be legal that is considered illegal in other countries and under international law. Doing so is what defines a "RogueState."

Torture "is basically subject to perception," CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."

A friendly message to those who might be traveling abroad; stick some stickers saying "Proud to be Canadian" on your carry-on before your board your plane.

And if you feel the need to "wax rhapsodic" about the American values of human rights, human dignity, and democracy, just please shut the hell up until the mood passes.

It's important to understand that almost all of the misery Kurnaz endured at Guantanamo came after he had been cleared of any connection to terrorism. As early as February 2002, German intelligence officials had concluded that there was no "direct" evidence that he was involved in terrorism; a September 2002 memo written by a German intelligence officer confirmed that Kurnaz was among the "considerable number" of Gitmo detainees who were "not part of the terrorist milieu."

... So for nearly four more years, this innocent man was beaten, starved, tortured, subjected to endless persecution in the form of interrogations designed to elicit perjured self-incriminating testimony. On September 30, 2004 -- two years after his innocence had been established -- Kurnaz was brought before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal staffed with officers who had access to the exculpatory 2002 memoranda. That august panel designated Kurnaz an "enemy combatant" on the basis of "evidence" it didn't deign to share with the detainee or his assigned military lawyer, who was utterly inert during the proceedings.

THIS is the image of America we will all live with for the rest of our lives.

The NCIS document contains new information about the deaths of some of these prisoners, including details about Farhad Mohamed, who had contusions under his eyes and the bottom of his chin, a swollen nose, cuts and large bumps on his forehead when he died in Mosul in 2004. The document also includes details about Naem Sadoon Hatab, a 52-year-old Iraqi man who was strangled to death at the Whitehorse detainment facility in Nasiriyah in June 2003; the shooting death of Hemdan El Gashame in Nasiriyah in March 2003; and the death of Manadel Jamadi during an interrogation after his head was beaten with a stove at Abu Ghraib in November 2003.

This has been done in your name, folks, and with your tax dollarsWe have a friend who travels frequently due to her job.

Recently, she confessed that when traveling abroad and people ask her where she's from, she says she's Canadian, rather than mention that she's from the US.

It will take decades for this country to wipe away the stain of what we have done in these prisons in the name of "US Security".

The fact that we have tortured (and/or outsourced torture) completely undermines our ability to talk about freedom, democracy, and the crucial value of human dignity to any other country.

A new court at Guantánamo would allow the U.S. military to keep its secrets by cutting off terror suspects' testimony from the ears of observers at the flick of a switch.

Now then, since the suspects are supposedly "the enemy", what secrets are they in possession of that the military considers theirs? Re-read that quote again; the purpose of the switch is to allow the military to keep "its secrets." How do the suspects come into possession of the US military's secrets?

Unless, of course, the secrets being kept is that the suspects (A) really worked for the US at the time they did whatever it is they are accused of, or (B) they have been tortured into confessing.

After a two-week fact-finding tour of US prison and detention facilities, a UN human rights investigator has blasted the administration of President George W. Bush for a rash of shortcomings in the country's flawed justice system and continued violations of the rule of law.

A large portion of Bush's "legacy, when all is said and done, will be that of pre-emptive wars abroad, the absolute evisceration of the Constitution and Bill of Rights at home, and the legitimization of the use of torture.

United Nations experts on child rights criticised the United States on Friday over detention of juveniles at Guantanamo, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and voiced concern that some may have suffered cruel treatment.

They also called for an end to recruitment of under-18s into the U.S. armed forces and for a halt to enlistment campaigns aimed specifically at young people from minority groups and poor or single-parent families.

Do not look for US recruiting practices to change any time soon, short of a reinstitution of a draft.

And as for cruelty to child prisoners; in the eyes of the US military, they are no different than any other prisoners or "military combatants".

"IDF soldiers routinely abuse bound and defenseless Palestinian detainees," a new report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) asserted on Sunday.

The abuse alleged in the report - which was written based on 90 testimonies of Palestinians and IDF soldiers and covered arrests made between 2006 and 2007- included beatings, degradation and other acts of violence, as well as acts directed at minors and some which resulted in serious injury.

A US military spokeswoman has dismissed suggestions that a new prison planned for Afghanistan is intended to receive prisoners from GuantanamoBay, the detention centre in Cuba that is facing increasing criticism in America.

"This is not going to be Guantanamo Two," said Lieutenant-Colonel Rumi Nielson-Green, spokeswoman for Combined Joint Task Force 101 based at Bagram Airfield, north of the Afghan capital Kabul. "That is absolutely false."

Memo to Lieutenant-Colonel Nielson-Green; if in fact what you have stated is truth, then let the Red Cross in consistently from the moment this facility receives prisoners to validate that what you are saying is true.

If the US refuses Red Cross access, the entire world will understand that the US is simply building another "black site" in a foreign country, and doing precisely what it (and foreign enablers) continue to do at other US black sites around the world.

Muslim prisoners held in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were submerged in water-filled garbage cans with ice or put naked under cold showers in near-freezing rooms until they went into shock, Sgt. Javal Davis, who served with the 372nd Military Police Company there, has told a national magazine.

Just when you think the brutality demonstrated at Abu Ghraib prison couldn't be any worse than we already knew........

In a report entitled "Locked Up Alone: Detention Conditions and Mental Health at Guantanamo," the group says 185 of the 270 detainees at the U.S. military prison for terrorism suspects are housed in facilities similar to "supermax" prisons.

They spend 22 hours alone in cramped cells, have very limited contact with other human beings and are given little more than the Koran to occupy themselves, said the report, which is based interviews with government officials and attorneys.

Detainees held in this manner include many that have not been charged with crimes and have already been cleared for release or transfer, according to the report.

Take a good hard look at that last paragraph.

Any pretense of the application of the rule of law, as has evolved through the American justice system, is ludicrous beyond comprehension here.

Medical examinations of suspected militants formerly held by the U.S. military at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba showed evidence of torture and other abuse that resulted in serious injuries and mental disorders, according to a human rights group.

The study, considered the most extensive medical check of former U.S. detainees published so far, also tracked former suspects held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, with similar findings.

Remember when the Bush White House kept insisting these abuses were the work of a few rogue soldiers?

Despite the ruling, Parhat has yet to see any of its benefits. In fact, he doesn't even know about it. Parhat's lawyer told CBC radio's As It Happens last night that Parhat is currently being held in solitary confinement and "has no idea" the appeals court ruled in his favor because, he added, "I'm not allowed to tell him":

The message travels among Guantanamo detainees in whispers between recreation areas and shouts through slots in cell doors: Don't trust the Americans. Boycott.

Guards call it the Detainee News Network, and it is now prompting inmates to turn their backs on their war-crimes trials at this U.S. Naval station in southeast Cuba.

These men understand that this isn't about any real justice: this is about "show trials" and kangaroo courts.

And if the prosecution in these cases wasn't terrified of some of these people telling the truth, why do they have an "off switch" in the witness booth to prevent observers from hearing what the prosecution doesn't want them to hear?

In a further embarrassment for Mr Bush yesterday, Malcolm Nance, an advisor on terrorism to the US departments of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence, publicly denounced the practice. He revealed that waterboarding is used in training at the US Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and EscapeSchool in San Diego, and claimed to have witnessed and supervised "hundreds" of waterboarding exercises. Although these last only a few minutes and take place under medical supervision, he concluded that "waterboarding is a torture technique - period".

"There's just no doubt in my mind — under any set of rules — waterboarding is torture," TomRidge said Friday in an interview with the Associated Press. Ridge had offered the same opinion earlier in the day to members of the American Bar Association at a homeland security conference.

"If it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it," McConnell told The New Yorker, which published a 16,000-word article Sunday on the director of national intelligence.

So it's not about the practice per se, but the legal ramifications now?

If any member of this administration has any possible doubts about water boarding being torture, they should try it, publicly. Let the cameras roll, and have that footage broadcast live around the world.

This country should withdraw completely and immediately not only from the Geneva Accords, but from any human rights treaty to which the US is a signatory

For despite all the drivel US diplomats regurgitate around the world about the US's respect for human rights and democracy, the government of this country no longer believes in those values.

The cleric's wife, Ghali Nabila, said her husband, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, was taken from Italy and transferred to a prison in Egypt, where, she said, he was repeatedly tortured. While acknowledging a program of "extraordinary rendition," or abducting terrorism suspects outside the United States, the Bush administration claims that no one is sent to nations that torture.

This country tortures, and outsources torture.

And a word to those traveling abroad.

If you feel compelled to talk about this country's core values of freedom, democracy, and human rights, just please shut up until the urge passes.

Those with whom you are speaking understand that these values hold utterly no meaning to those in the highest offices of this country .

A February 2006 Human Rights First report found that although hundreds of people in U.S. custody had died and eight people were tortured to death, only 12 deaths had "resulted in punishment of any kind for any U.S. official."

Torture and murder: right up there with mom and apple pie these days as American values, courtesy of this administration!

The US detention center now houses some 630 prisoners, an increase from a total of little more than 100 in early 2004 and some 500 in early 2006, and more than twice the number currently held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The deteriorating military and security situation in Afghanistan is driving the process, notes the Times. All but 30 of the prisoners are Afghans, allegedly captured in raids or on the battlefield.

We cannot, as a nation, begin to lecture the rest of the world about human rights, democracy, and freedom while we continue to torture.

If the members of this administration supporting this policy of US torture were really honest, they would simply withdraw the US as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, and let the whole world know what they really think about human rights.

In a confidential memorandum last summer, the Red Cross said dozens of prisoners had been held incommunicado for weeks or even months in a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells at Bagram, two American officials said. The Red Cross said the prisoners were kept from its inspectors and sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions, one of the officials said.

“The problem at Bagram hasn’t gone away,” said Tina M. Foster, a New York human rights lawyer who has filed federal lawsuits on behalf of the detainees at Bagram. “The government has just done a better job of keeping it secret.”

Let's just scream this from the rooftops in DC, and in every major capital of the world (where our presence is still tolerated to some degree): the US tortures! There, we've said it, plain and simple.

Don't you feel relieved now?

The next major, and honest, step, would be a complete, absolute, unilateral - and public - withdrawal from the Geneva Accords.

That, once and for all, will demonstrate precisely what the government of this country has become under Bush's watch.

The documents unearthed by the Senate Armed Services Committee, along with testimony from a recent hearing, shed new light on the role played by the man who was the nation's highest-ranking military officer and who acted, by law, as the top military advisor to President Bush. Until now, it was unclear how Myers handled those duties during the genesis of the military's harsh-interrogation program.

"He is rarely referenced as one of the usual suspects," noted Jonathan Turley, a professor at GeorgeWashingtonLawSchool who is following the continuing Senate investigation. "He did play a much more central role" than previously known, Turley said. "The minute the military lawyers expressed concern, they were shut down."

As we come up on this 4th of July holiday, it is almost terrifying to contemplate what we, now a nation which officially tortures, have become under the watch of this administration.

General - and then President - Washington developed a very strict protocol about how prisoners were to be treated, and never tortured. This is what he said:

"Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause... for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country." - George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

FOUR CIA jets, two of which were identified last year in a special EU report into the practice of extraordinary rendition, have landed at Shannon Airport in recent days, leading to renewed calls for the Government to ban aircraft suspected of participating in the practice.

The planes, operated by Centurion Aviation Services, a shelf company for the CIA, were identified in the EU report on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners, which was published in November 2006. Despite this, both jets continue to stop at Shannon.

And so, the torture continues, funded by your tax dollars and done in your name.

Torture: it's right up there with mom and apple pie as an American value these days.

And to those in both governmental and educational institutions who might be traveling out of the country, a friendly word of advice. Please just shut your collective traps concerning human rights, human dignity, freedom and democracy and their relevance to American foreign policy today.

I'm just mentioning this to protect you from getting laughed or booed out of the room, or perhaps worse.

Thinking people around the world understand very clearly that the US no longer values those ideals, and particularly at the highest level of its government.

A classified memo written by a top military official stationed in Western Iraq reveals that a prison in downtown Fallujah is so overcrowded and dirty that it does not even meet basic "minimal levels of hygiene for human beings."

"The conditions in these jails are so bad that I think we need to do the right thing in terms of caring for the prisoners even with our own dollars, or release them," says the memo, written late last month by Maj. Gen. John Kelly, commander of U.S forces in western Iraq.

These jailed individuals have moms, dads, brothers, sisters, other relatives and friends.

They know, or at least intuit, what it happening to those in this jail.

And again, Iraqis do not hate us "because we are free": they hate us because of what we have done to their families, countrymen, and their nation.

The Iraqis will meet MoD lawyers on Wednesday inside the Treasury for negotiations presided over by the former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, to determine a settlement which will include compensation for the death of Baha Musa.

The 26-year-old receptionist had suffered 93 identifiable injuries at the hands of British soldiers in Basra in September 2003. He had died after being subjected to 36 hours of beatings and abusive treatment, including being double-hooded with hessian sacks in stifling conditions.

The embrace of illegal detentions and torture are among the truly horrific decisions that can be attributed to the Bush White House. It is ironic to read the media accounts surrounding the recent discovery by shocked U.S. Marines of an alleged al-Qaeda torture center in Iraq's Diyala province because the Marines work for a government that itself publicly embraces torture as an interrogation technique. And it is not just the White House. Torture is bipartisan. The recent House of Representatives intelligence appropriations bill included a clause that requires CIA to abide by the Geneva Conventions in its interrogation and detention policies. One hundred and ninety-nine Congressmen from both parties voted "no." Even if some of the Congressmen voted against the bill for other reasons, there is a strong sense that many politicians consider torture to be perfectly okay.

On Bush's watch, torture has become the new, accepted American value, right up there with mom and apple pie.

But the problem this has created, geopolitically, is that now US officials cannot, with a straight face, lecture countries about democracy and human rights when we are, in fact, a country which accepts the use of torture: that just won't work.

Britain's Defence Ministry is to admit that its troops tortured and breached the human rights of nine Iraqi men they detained in southern Iraq in 2003, opening the way to potentially large compensation claims.

"If our government continues on [this destructive] path, we will ultimately have destroyed much of the moral and legal fabric of the society that we claim to be protecting. The choice and the responsibility are entirely ours."

Phoenix was far from an "aid and development" program. To achieve deniability, the CIA trained and transferred operational authority to the South Vietnamese national police, who tortured suspects indiscriminately. CIA officer William Colby, founder of the program, told a Congressional committee in 1971 that the Phoenix operation had killed 20,587 Vietcong suspects in two years. An official Pentagon evaluation in 1968 found that "the truncheon and electric shock method of interrogation were in widespread use, with almost all [US] advisors admitting to have witnessed instances of the use of these methods...[and] 'turned their backs on them.' " A Naval Institute historian later found that "the large majority of South Vietnamese interrogators tortured some or all of the communist prisoners in their care" as well as Vietnamese suspected of collaboration with the Vietcong.

With people like this calling the shots in Iraq, this country simply needs to withdraw from any and all human rights treaties this country has ever signed, just to make it clear to the world what the US policy is on torture and human rights.

Of course, this also means that we have no business lecturing "crackpot dictatorships" about democracy and freedom, because we have become, under the Bush administration's watch, just such a country.

Citing "ticking time bomb" scenarios, Romney disagrees with the notion of admitting that a particular practice could violate the Geneva Convention, thereby preventing its utilization by the United States in the event of an urgent need to extract information to, for example, prevent a nuclear attack.

Then, let this country follow that philosophy to its logical conclusion; a complete withdrawal from any and all human rights treaties it has ever signed.

The accepted use of torture by police in this country(by way of tazer use, which can cause death), combined with the passing of specific legislation (like the Patriot Act) which eviscerates the Constitution are clear demonstrations that this country is headed down the slippery slope of a "soft" dictatorship.

My Disclaimer:

I present this information in my capacity as a human being, under Common Law, exercising my fundamental God given rights and freedoms. This information represents my private thoughts and beliefs and has been compiled and expressed for educational purposes only. In no way should it be construed as either legal or financial advice. If anyone feels a need to determine the accuracy of this information and the effectiveness of apply any of it, I strongly recommend consulting a competent expert on this subject matter.

Here's a Clue:Look the one place "They" never talk about.Look to your heart, as your competent expert lies within."Seek and you shall find."